Wikimania is on and Scholia is off

Wikimania the wonderful gathering of Wikimedians is on in Paris. I have been there before, I have presented at several Wikimanias. It is truly awesome. It is the one place where all aspects of what the Wikimedia Foundation is come together, mingle and have a conversation. There is one inescapable fact; it is mostly about Wikipedia and at that, if it does not fit the English Wikipedia community, conversations will not bring you much.

The two biggest revolutions that happened lead to two new projects and apart from their function they did not change English Wikipedia. It was too expensive to have the same picture on all projects, pictures are now stored at Commons. The English community objected to its policy of only freely licensed pictures so nothing changed as they may still serve licensed materials as an illustration. Articles on the same subject were linked through "interwiki links" the process to maintain them was too costly, a centralised database was created, the links are now stable at Wikidata. The English community was not bothered because it were nerds mostly from other projects who maintained those interwiki links.

The decisions to have both Commons and Wikidata were made by the Wikimedia Foundation.

The 25th birthday of Wikipedia is celebrated in Paris and it has its challenges and opportunities. The biggest challenges in my opinion are communities that are aging and decreasing in size and information that is outdated or incomplete. Opportunities can be found in the "sum of all the knowledge that we already have". One iterative question for an AI: "What are the inconsistencies within our Wikipedias". Another is to have Abstract Wikipedia provide information for all the misses when an article is locally missing.

Why not challenge our public to be part of the solution?

Thanks,

       GerardM

PS Great tools like Scholia should be adopted by the Foundation so that it is always available and we could open up our references in a more informed fashion.

SignWriting 2025 - A response to a Wiktionary initiative.

On Diff, the aggregator for Wikimedia news, a case was made to support sign languages particularly for Wiktionary. Sign languages are used to communicate, there are many hundreds of sign languages, only half the people who know how to sign are deaf. There is one writing system, SignWriting that can be used for all sign languages.

There are a few misconceptions in the Wiktionary proposal; with over 300 sign languages, there is a potential for over 300 translations for each concept. Sign languages are not to be linked to countries; there are countries with multiple indigenous sign languages. All languages have their own ISO-639 language code the same, ase for instance is the code for American Sign Language. 

The characters of the SignWriting script are included in the same standard that includes all other scripts like Cyrillic or Devangari. The consequence is that as your computer supports UNICODE, your computer will be able to show texts written in SignWriting when you have a supporting font. At that Google may be your friend with its Noto Sans font and the Wikimedia Foundation may provision readers of its projects content.

A decade ago, there was a concerted effort from within the SignWriting movement to have Wikipedias in multiple sign languages. Much of what transpired can still be read on my blog. At the time the Wikimedia Foundation did not have the bandwidth to support the technical requirements in MediaWiki. It is why the deaf who express themselves with their sign language have no platform within the Wikimedia Foundation.

Thanks,

        GerardM

Growing exposure for Wikimedia content

The downward trend in the number of readers and editors of Wikipedia is a big issue but maintenance is imho as problematic. Too many articles are out of date, need an update or are factually problematic. There is not one but there are 250+ Wikipedias intended to serve the sum of all available knowledge and they all need more readers and editors to amend and append.

When we go back to first principles, references are the basis for every article and item. We could serve all known references and add reference material for people to find. They could be youtubes, scholarly papers, articles from newspapers and all that in any language. New references are linked to subjects and this makes it easier to contribute to Wikipedia articles. 

Obviously Wikipedia articles, Commons pictures, all are to be included in the search results. There is also an opportunity for Abstract-Wikipedia; even a one liner in every language is an important result particularly when it expands as more information becomes available in Wikidata.

The objective is more eyeballs for what we have on offer. "WikiFind" will expose content from partners like Internet Archive. It may expose content from YouTube, newspapers whatever.. When new content is to be exposed, it is to be linked to a topic as known in Wikidata. 

The objective is to increase our public and I may rain on the parade of many improvements considered for Wikipedia but will they improve quality or will they improve exposure. Improvements are nice to have, exposure is a must have.

Thanks,

       GerardM